A Sojourn in Spain: Thoughts on Andalucia

It’s a deep historical irony that some five centuries after Spain’s rulers utilized all of the power at their disposal to remove conquered non-Christian minorities such as the Muslim Moors and the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, many of the country’s major cultural tourist attractions are grounded in the unique heritage of these vanished communities. This is most true of the southern region of Spain that was held under the sway of Islamic authorities for the longest period, known from the 8th to 15th Century as al-Andalus and now the semi-autonomous region of Andalucia. The Muslim influence on the history and culture of this part of Spain is now especially reified and monetized as a particularly notable feature of the region, despite a long history of official erasure of this precise sort of cultural difference.

Across Andalucia are telling signs of this process of erasure of these now-restored elements and replacement with Spain’s particularly fervent Catholic culture, often emblazoned into the enduring architecture of its ancient cities. Moorish architectural embellisments survive on old gates, walls, arches, and buildings, with occasional more extensive masterpieces surviving behind walled-off sections of interiors and thanks to the rare progressive impulse towards preservation winning out under the aegis of Early Modern and Enlightenment authorities. Some Jewish sites, including three pre-expulsion medieval sinagogues, survive as well (although two of them are further north, in Toledo). Even when the specific original edifices are no longer standing, architectural concepts endure: the comforting, leafy courtyards (“patios”) that hide in private residence in Andalucia’s cities are a direct inheritance from the Moors, just as the ablution fountains and minarets of their mosques became garden cloisters and bell towers in the Catholic cathedrals built over them. Defining cultural features of modern Spain (and Andalucia especially) like tapas and flamenco are often traced to Muslim sources as well.

The region’s largest city and governmental seat, Seville, preserves mere echoes of the once-thriving Islamic kingdom. In its Alcazar palace, Moorish gardens with citrus trees and gently gurgling fountains ring the interior rooms, many of which boast spectacular, intricate decoration in the Moorish style commissioned of converso craftsmen by King Pedro I soon after the city was conquered by Christian armies. These are the quintessential works of the mudejar architectural style, the adaptation of Islamic architectural tropes for the buildings of Christian rulers. Seville’s most recognizable building, the Giralda bell tower adjacent to its massive, gloomy Gothic cathedral, is an adapted minaret, the elegant patterns on its lower section now topped by Late Renaissance crenelations for the bells.

In this way, the narrative stream of history as it is written on buildings is perhaps more immediately and strikingly visual apparent nowhere but in Andalucia. The architectural intrusions of early post-Reconquista Christian monarchs on the magnificent constructions of the defeated Moors demonstrate the sudden, harsh detours connected with the privileging of a new faith or set of cultural and aesthetic beliefs over an older one.

One Christian perpetrator of these surmountings stands above all others in the Spanish context: King Charles I, a.k.a. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Every major surviving Moorish landmark in Andalucia seems to have survived its greatest threat in Charles V’s ostentatious Renaissance legacy projects. Pedro’s mudejar chambers in Seville’s Alcazar stand alongside Charles’ austere rooms with wooden-beam ceilings, which replaced more elaborately-decorated older designs. A monumental square palace still bearing his name seems to have been dropped into the midst of the organic, sensual sprawl of Granada’s hilltop Alhambra like a heavy book on an elegant spider, though it cannot intrude on the rare magnificence of the Nasrid-era palaces next to it. Most damningly and unfortunately, the sylvan procession of elegant columns and candy-striped arches of the Great Mosque of Cordoba are sharply interrupted by a horrifying, gaudy Baroque nave, altar and choir that even Charles V had enough sense to realize was a tragic aesthetic mistake (not that he was so distraught as to undo the change, mind you).

It is in Cordoba’s great monument to the era of al-Andalus that history’s upheavals are writ largest and starkest. Though colloquially referred to as the Great Mosque or the Mezquita-Catedral in tourist-focused literature and advertisements, it is never called anything but a cathedral upon the holy premises themselves. There is a certain defiance to this labelling that transfers into the audio materials and guides for visitors, which call Charles V’s Baroque addition “controversial” but steadfastly refuse to elaborate that the controversy is above all aesthetic, as well as imparting cynical pecuniary motives to those among the city’s grandees who contemporaneously opposed its construction. The building may only be so notable due to the architectural inspiration of a rival faith, but never is the visitor allowed to forget which institution of belief runs the show now.

Still, even if the sightlines of marching columns are fouled by the central Christian addition and the numerous side-chapels, the Mosque of Cordoba offers illustrative microcosms of the historical processes that witness one value-system overcoming another. Multiple eras of history are visible, sometimes simultaneously in the naked eye of the observer. A glass floor reveals excavated mosaics beneath the church floor from a former Roman basilica, Visigothic ruins sit in display cases nearby, the Muslim arches run along in colour-alternating rows (the oldest of them held up by repurposed Roman and Visigothic columns), and Christian devotional paintings hang from chapel altars. The eras of Cordoban history are stacked before your eyes like a layer cake. Cordoba’s Mezquita-Catedral, perhaps more than any other historical site in Europe if not in the entire world, renders the gradations of historical change with the clear visual demarcations of geological layers in the earth.

Spain itself today still reveals those gradations of historical change in its society, culture, and monuments, though you may have to look more closely to find them than in Cordoba. If Spain at large is a kaleidoscope of regional identities and conflicting histories drawn together into a patchwork state, then Andalucia is a microcosm of that effect as well as an amplification. Spain, it seems, is more Spain in Andalucia than anywhere else.